Vice Presidential Debate Ratings: How Many People Watched JD Vance and Tim Walz?

On Tuesday (October 1) night, the two major candidates for vice president in the 2024 election took the stage at CBS Broadcast Center in New York City to state their case for the White House. Republican nominee Tim Walz, who is on the ticket with Donald Trump, joined Democratic nominee Tim Walz, who is running alongside Kamala Harris, and they talked about a wide range of issues in the debate, moderated by Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan.

There have been a range of takeaways and viral moments from the debate, which is likely to be the only meeting of these two candidates and possibly the final debate of the election cycle overall. But how many people actually tuned in to see the showdown?

While we’ll have to wait a bit longer for the full viewership count for each network that carried the debate, early numbers indicate that there was a bit of a drop in interest for the VP debate as compared to 2020’s match-up of Harris and then-VP Mike Pence.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the early numbers indicate 38.62 million viewers tuned in across the four biggest networks (ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC) and the major cable news networks (CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC), with final numbers expected to be somewhere in the range of 45 to 50 million. If that holds true, it’d be a drop off from the 57.92 million who tuned in to the veepstakes in 2020.

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The largest audience from this set of early metrics indicates the debate’s host, CBS News, is the leader in audience size with 9.14 million viewers to Fox News’ 7.69 million, ABC’s 6.1 million, NBC’s 5.44 million, MSNBC’s 4.65 million, CNN’s 3.18 million, and Fox’s 2.42 million.

The ratings for the 2024 presidential election’s debate cycle have been a bit mixed. When Joe Biden was still at the top of the Democratic ticket and faced off against Trump in June, the candidates had a total audience of 51.3 million viewers. Trump’s second debate, this time with Harris, marked a sharp uptick in viewership, with 67.1 million tuning in.

This post will be updated when the final numbers for the VP debate viewership are in.